


Chameleon Souls

by deslea



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Fic, M/M, fest fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-18
Updated: 2017-05-18
Packaged: 2018-10-17 07:32:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10589343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deslea/pseuds/deslea
Summary: They have always been chameleons. Written for HP Darkarts Horror Fest 2017 (prompt 107).





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the hp_darkarts Horror Fest 2017. Prompt 107: "The boy was just a squib, but he could use him anyway." There was also a note, "Manipulative seduction and what more. NC-17 please. Too much UST in the movie." It's not quite NC17, but hopefully close enough to the spirit of the prompt anyway.

_"My mother told me I had a chameleon soul, no moral compass pointing due north, no fixed personality; just an inner indecisiveness that was as wide and as wavering as the ocean." - Lana Del Ray_

 

**i. Gellert**

He has always been a chameleon.

He thinks this as he walks through another city (yet again) in another guise (yet again). He has never had a home, not really, but he is not homeless. The world is his home, every corner of it. As he needs one, he makes one wherever he may be.

He has great powers, and those help ease his path, but they are not how he does what he does. It is because of his ability to adapt, to reflect the essence of the places in which he goes. People see in him someone who is perfectly in place, no matter where he may be.

His great hunger is for power, and that helps too, because most share some understanding of that hunger. He has travelled into rare, far-flung places where that is not the case, but rarely lingers. He can fit in if he must, but the way those societies function is rarely to his taste.

But in the main, his desires are universal, and so he can fit in with almost everyone. Among the strong, he finds kindred spirits. Among the weak, he finds admirers and followers. Like a chameleon, he never really changes; rather, he positions himself to reflect the facets of himself that attract and mirror the glimmers of those around.

He is whatever his compatriots choose to see, and yet always himself.

 

**ii. Credence**

He has always been a chameleon. Foundlings usually are, at least the ones who thrive. 

"Thrive" may be too strong a word for what he does, but he has more than survived. In the complex social order of the Barebone workhouse (politely referred to as New Salem Philanthropic Society, but it is a workhouse at heart), he has risen to the top of its sighing, wearied tiers. 

He is the most senior, the most trusted. The most targeted, too, as it happens, but then, the two tend to go hand in hand. 

As in all things, he reflects the desires of those around. 

He is most comfortable with those whose desires are clear, people firm and strong in their resolve, no matter what that resolve may be. Mary Lou desires someone to dominate, and so he submits, but he submits on his own terms. He submits in order to thrive.

He is at his bravest with Modesty, because Modesty is brave and curious and she wants someone to be brave with her. He is at his weakest with the occasional sympathisers who cross his path, those who wish to comfort him. There are few of those, now that he is grown, but when he was a child there were many. Mary Lou is admired by some and ridiculed by many, but she is loved not at all.

With those who desire nothing but for him to be himself, he is acutely uncomfortable. He grasps for something to guide him, and wishes for nothing more than to get away. However, this is a rarity, in his world and the world at large. 

Because everybody wants something. _Everyone._ Especially from a foundling.

What was it that awful newsman Shaw had said? "Nobody gives anything valuable away for free." It was the first time anyone had come right out and said it out loud, but he had known. He'd always known. It is a truth known best by those like him, those who will sell whatever they must, and men like Shaw, who can buy whatever they want. It is only those in the middle, those who needn't sell and cannot buy, who believe any different.

Mary Lou knows it, too. She may be obsessive, but she isn't stupid. She'd said what so many deny. "You're right. What we desire is infinitely more valuable than money. It's your _influence."_

He has never loved her, and rarely liked her, but oh, how he felt her burning shame when the Senator called them freaks. Called _him_ a freak. He felt the effort it took her to keep her dignity as they left.

He wants to take the Senator's viciously smiling face, and make it melt beneath his hands.

 

**iii. Gellert**

The boy is no-one's child.

He has known many no-one's children; he seeks them out. They are shrewd enough to be useful and needy enough to be controlled. They are among his favourite tools.

So they are useful; there is that. But it is also more. They are both simple and exquisitely complicated. Multi-faceted. So much more interesting than most of the people he controls. 

The rules that are designed to benefit the majority do not benefit them, and they know it. They are the cracks in society's façade. Freed from the vested interests that keep most people in line, they question. Sometimes they question intelligently, sometimes recklessly, sometimes with the naiveté of a child. But the questioning itself has value. It is a language that Gellert speaks.

It is rare, for someone to pique his interest that way. It draws him. Tantalises him. Maybe not in the lasting way of an equal, but for a moment, a while, oh yes.

The boy draws him. There is a slow cunning in the way he submits, the way he _chooses_ to be dominated. He wants belonging and home, and believes Gellert can help him get it. 

There is no finesse about the boy's attempted manipulations, but there is spirit, hiding beneath the cowering demeanour, and Gellert admires it. He admires it enough to want to sample it, like a cheap yet oddly interesting wine in a foreign land.

This particular foreign land has yielded opportunity and utility, but little interest, so he samples the rare delicacies he can.

 

**iv. Credence**

Great men know how to get what they want.

Graves is a great man, a man with power who wants even more of it.

Graves also wants _him._

It isn't the first time he's been wanted that way. Foundlings are prey for so many things. And this is the least of them, really. Sometimes he minds. With Graves, he doesn't.

"Do you think I'm a freak?" he says. A man concerned with his desires will sometimes tell truths otherwise left unspoken.

Graves soothes him. Promises that he isn't. Promises belonging and home. Promises the things he craves.

"I want those things for you, Credence," Graves says, seeming to savour the syllables of his name. "So find the child. Find the child and we'll all be free."

It is a lie. He knows it, of course he does, because nothing comes free to a foundling.

But Graves wants him to believe, and _he_ wants to believe. And so he believes. At least for now.

"What then?" he demands. "After?"

Graves comes closer, insinuating into his space. Lowers his face to Credence's upturned one. Hisses:

"You'll be mine."

His kiss is suffocating and sweet, but even as Credence sinks into it, he knows that he is no-one's, and that this is the greatest lie of all.

 

**v. Gellert**

Anticipation is so much more powerful than satisfaction. 

The wonder of _Obliviate_ means that it is possible to have both.

He thinks this as he captures Credence's lips with his own, insisting his way in. As Credence slumps to the wall, moaning about _yes_ and _yours_. He thinks it as clothes and thighs give way. As he thrusts gloriously into that willing, waiting body.

 _"Obliviate,"_ he says afterwards, and it pleases him that in some dim back room of his mind, Credence will _know._ He won't recall it, but he will feel aches and fullness and emptiness too. His body will remember, and he will _want._ He will want power, and belonging, and home, and the decadent feel of flesh against flesh. It will frustrate and torment him until he finds the thing he seeks. The dark power. The force.

It pleases him so much that he can't resist going back for more.

More Credence. More of him on his lips. Beneath his hands. Wrapped around his cock. More Credence, more _Obliviate._ More _Obliviate_ than he should in a single day, really, but he does it anyway. 

It isn't the first time. It won't be the last.

 

**vi. Credence**

His dreams have always been vivid, but lost to his memory. 

He wakes from them with aches from another world, another time. Another existence, where a different and darker Credence walks the earth. _This_ Credence unleashes what waking Credence would extinguish. _This_ Credence cares nothing for the will of others. _This_ Credence unfurls his desires and takes them without restraint or mercy.

Senator Shaw, raised high then flung low. Face melting beneath blackened hands.

_Freak. Freak._

Graves against a wall. Pounding into him as he has been pound, pounding with pleasure and with a strange fury for which he cannot ascribe a cause or name.

_"You're the one who gains this child's trust, you are the key. A child no older than ten-"_

Graves on his knees. Credence plunges dark, formless hands into his hair.

Some childlike, fearful corner of his mind protests through the roaring blood in his ears and the irresistible pleasure of Graves' mouth upon him. _Not Modesty,_ it clamours, _not Modesty-_

 _No, not Modesty,_ another part of his mind soothes, a calm, adult part, and instantly he knows it is true. Not Modesty, no.

 _But who?_ that childlike voice wonders, before he can make it stop, and the fear in the question brings him up, out of the fog of anger and lust and heat.

 _Don't you know?_ Graves needles, sliding his way back up Credence's body. _Don't you?_

 _You don't know,_ his calmer mind says firmly. _And consider this: What will he do when he finds out?_

In the beat of utter silence that follows, he looks on Graves. His body still pounds, but with lust or fear, he is no longer sure. It is a split second that deepens into an eternity.

The childlike voice breaks the unbearable silence. _Home? Belonging?_ it says hopefully, but with a questioning note that betrays him. He doesn't believe it. Not deep down, here in the dark where no colours are seen.

_A lie_ , that calm voice says. _He's a parasite, making his home wherever he goes. All he has to give you is what he gives you in dark places. And he takes even that away again. He offers nothing that lasts. You know this._

_Yes. I know._

He wakes, shivering, exhausted, his bedsheets damp with sweat and seed. He wakes feeling battered, yet somehow cleansed.

It doesn't last.

 

**vii. Gellert**

If there is one mistake he has repeated in his life, it is to discard the weak too harshly, and too soon.

He'd done it with Ariana. He'd considered only her weakness. But if he'd factored in the power she'd had over the people who loved her, he might have had Albus with him now.

Now he has done it again, with Credence.

He'd considered only the weakness on the surface, been blind to the power within. He'd rejected the boy, thinking he'd found the power he needed elsewhere, and he'd done it with needless cruelty. A stupid, wasteful thing to do. Why had he done that?

He supposes that he could have told Credence his rejection was a ruse, a ploy to bring out his power. The Credence he'd known, the _other_ Credence, might have believed it.

But _this_ Credence is a different creature altogether. Deceiving that dark, fathomlessly beautiful ball of wanton power is out of the question. _It is one of his kind._

"I was wrong about you," he says. They are probably the most truthful words he has ever spoken. He will not gain the control of the Obscurial that he seeks. He knows that now.

But it will be unleashed on the world, a great power. A force of nature upsetting the delicate balance of their world.

He is an anarchist, beneath it all. He doesn't crave his own idea of order so much as the destruction of all notions of order. A world where the great take their natural place and that which is weak falls away. _This_ Credence, a great and mighty Credence, no-one's Credence, is a net good.

"You can control it," he coaxes. He says it the way he once offered _home._ A seductive lie wrapped around a deeper truth. A deeper need.

"Maybe I don't want to," Credence says slyly, but that sly tone to his voice speaks of choice.

Choice is a kind of power.

It's enough.

 

**viii. Credence**

The dark force inside himself may not be his friend, but nor is it his foe.

It is a protector of sorts. It awakens at full force for enemies like Shaw. It falls back for those who are kind, like the dark-haired woman. For his own kind, dark wizards like Graves ( _Gellert, his name is Gellert,_ the dark force whispers), it can go either way.

And when necessary, it protects him from himself.

These truths are whispered in his ear when he is ready to give up. When he is assaulted by the magic of his own kind, when their rejection assaults his mind. When he is gathered up and away by the winds of his own darkness, leaving only a glimmer of himself behind for them to think they have destroyed.

The moment is recognised by Gellert, and he takes that moment to reveal himself. Distracting their mutual enemies from looking too closely at his destruction. Distracts them from the question of whether any of him is left.

Whatever Gellert might have owed him, he thinks it is paid. 

But with everyone gone, Gellert and Mary Lou and Modesty, he has no place. Not in the world of his youth, nor the wizarding one either. He is completely alone. 

It is an unsettling thought, but not a devastating one. Loneliness is terrain he knows well. He knows how to navigate it and thrive in it. He can nurture himself there.

It dawns on him that he has become his own foundling child.

What had he thought about Gellert once? _He makes his home wherever he goes._ It occurs to him that he could do the same, now. They are, after all, two of a kind. 

Very well, he thinks - thinks it with surprising resolve and calm. He will occupy whatever place he takes up in the world as though it is his own. Wherever it is. 

With astonishment, he realises that with no one around him, the desires he reflects now are his own.

Perhaps, on his own, he belongs, after all.

END

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. I struggled to write this one. I felt a bit like a magpie, picking up shiny threads from Gellert and Credence's psyche, and I don't know how well they really worked together. It's also a fair bit lighter on the smut than the prompt had asked for. I hope you like it anyway!
> 
> 2\. You might be wondering about the chameleon analogy and the way Gellert in particular sees himself as reflecting what's around him while remaining unchanged himself. The mechanism by which chameleons change colour was not understood until just a couple of years ago. They do not alter their pigmentation. Rather, they change the position and distribution of a lattice-like layer of cells to allow different light frequencies to reflect different colours off their pigments at different times. (I am assuming for convenience here that this knowledge may have been held earlier in the wizarding world due to the work of people like Newt).
> 
> 3\. I have a half-formed theory, which is buried in here, that Gellert's manipulations of Credence might have had a lot to do with his Obscurial becoming more dominant and less controlled, and that there was possibly some sort of interplay with sexual awakening and conflicts as well. (I had an idea of Credence having conflicts about sexuality that mirrored conflicts about his magical nature, but when I tried to extend that idea, I found that it kind of broke the main arc, because it required too much real estate in the story to explore it properly compared to the rest of the ideas in the story). In this story, the conflicts were probably also compounded by Gellert's excessive use of _Obliviate._
> 
> 4\. Harry Potter Wiki and others refer to Mary Lou Barebone's organisation as New Salem Philanthropic Society, and that is the terminology in the script. In the movie, Langdon Shaw calls it New Salem Preservation Society. I have used the script terminology, following speculation in Harry Potter Wiki that the movie reference was either a mistake, or an improvisation to indicate Langdon's poor attention to detail.


End file.
